TweakTown News Posts - Page 2101

Facebook has been banned in China for what seems like forever, but now Beijing has lifted the ban on the Internet access within the Shanghai free-trade Zone to foreign websites that were previously considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government.

These websites included Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times, but now according to government sources who told the South China Morning Post, the authority in charge of the Hong Kong-like free-trade zone in Shanghai is a first in mainland China. This would also see bids coming in from foreign telecommunications companies for license to provide Internet services within the new zone.

One of the government sources told the South China Morning Post: "In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home. If they can't get onto Facebook or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China."

Samsung has chosen today to unveil its new imaging sensor technology dubbed ISOCELL. ISOCELL, according to Samsung, will substantially increase light sensitivity by "controlling the absorption of electrons," which will help in low light conditions.

How does this even work? Were you like me, lost at the "controlling the absorption of electrons" bit, too? Well, Samsung says that BSI (Back Side Illumination) is very limited in how much it can affect your pictures in low light conditions, whereas ISOCELL has a barrier between each and every pixel. This will reportedly cut electrical crosstalk by up to 30%.

Not only that, but ISOCELL will also allow a wider field of light absorption so that the camera module can be thinner. We should begin to see ISOCELL-based devices toward the end of the year.

Yes. $10,000. Business Insider notes that eBay users are selling their gold iPhone 5S' for thousands of dollars, because demand is just so huge for them right now. I really don't know why someone would spend $10,000+ on a device that is worth less than 1/10 of that, but it goes to show you the demand for them right now.

CNNMoney has called Riot Games the third best medium-sized business in the US. The League of Legends creator was donned with the 'award' from a global research and consulting firm called Great Place to Work.

Great Place to Work assembled its list of top businesses with less than 1,000 business, with candidates being chosen for their "unique cultures" and environments on the same level as CNNMoney's 100 Best Companies to Work For compilation. Riot Games employs 846 people, of which some were plucked at random to talk about Riot Games' culture and programs.

Riot Games' statement reads: "This process gave us the opportunity to share Riot culture and stories, but also gave us a chance to take cultural inventory of where we're at and where we still need to go."

LG has just unveiled its Vu 3 smartphone, which will be the main competitor to the Galaxy Note 3 from Samsung. The Vu 3 is an interesting device, as it keeps its 4:3 aspect ratio, making it more square rather than tall or wide.

The LG Vu 3 features a 5.2-inch IPS display that has a resolution of 1280x960. Inside the Vu 3 is some great hardware, with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and LTE-A support. The Vu 3 launches on Friday in Korea, in black, white or mint colors. There's no availability at the moment for the US and Europe, but we should expect that in the coming weeks and months.

Google has just announced the launch of a new project it calls Constitute, a website that organizes all of the world's constitutions in one easily searchable and user-friendly interface. The website allows users to filter charters by the date that they were created and indexes both basic details and policies.

This new service offered by Google is a very important service just for the fact that it makes every constitution in the world easily readable, something that many countries make very hard to find. I am sure that there are more than a few political science majors out there who are viewing this new website as a true godsend and thanking Google for making their research much easier.

Google released an update today for its flagship smartphone, the Moto X. The update greatly improves the performance of the phone's rear-facing camera. The update comes after several major sites criticized the camera's performance in their reviews, but thankfully Google took note and adjusted things accordingly.

The software update improves on the camera's exposure, color accuracy, and focus speed, all of which took major hits in the press. Unfortunately at the moment, the update is only being pushed out to phones on T-Mobile's network, but it is widely expected to roll out to other carriers quite soon. In addition, the update increases the touchless control accuracy and fixes choppy audio that some users have been experiencing while in voice calls.

Browser plug-ins are one of the largest security vulnerabilities facing today's computers, and Google aims to remove this issue from their Chrome browser once and for all. Starting in January 2014, Google will begin banning all of the most widely used browser plug-ins and will insist that developers begin using programming methods that use standards built directly into the web.

Most of the plug-ins featured on Chrome use the Netscape Plug-In Application programming interface, a technology that was state-of-the-art more than 10 years ago. Plug-ins should not be confused with much safer Add-Ons, which Google distributes through its Chrome Web Store. Fortunately, plug-ins such as Microsoft's Silverlight, Unity, Java, Flash, and Facebook Video will be white listed in the ban, so most of your services should continue functioning normally.

Earlier today, HighPoint announced that it has began shipping the RocketU 1144C, which it says is the world's fastest USB 3.0 controller. The USB 3.0 controller card is powered by HighPoint's per-port performance architecture and a fast PCI-E 2.0 x4 host interface that is combined with UAS technology, which is responsible for this controllers abnormally fast speeds.

Today, Mellanox announced the immediate release of its MetroX TX6100 solution that enables InfiniBand and Ethernet RDMA connectivity between data centers. Mellanox says that "MetroX allows for rapid disaster recovery and improve utilization of remote storage and compute infrastructures across long distances and multiple geographic sites."

"A common problem facing data-driven researchers is the time cost of moving their data between systems, from machines in one facility to the next, which can slow their computations and delay their results," said Mike Shuey, HPC systems manager at Purdue University. "Mellanox's MetroX solution lets us unify systems across campus, and maintain the high-speed access our researchers need for intricate simulations -- regardless of the physical location of their work."

Purdue University recently deployed MetroX TX6100 over six kilometers to connect their computational clusters to storage facilities thus providing access to its remote-based supercomputers and allowing Purdue University to organize limited access to data center space more efficiently resulting in higher facilities utilization.